After spending the holidays with old friends in Montana, I reflected on all the many places I have been in the world. I have been blessed to have incredible opportunities that have lead to amazing adventures. This last year I started really thinking about how I could keep track of it all. I don't own my own home, so I don't have that nice den wall where I could hang a world map up and start pinning it. Given how virtual my life seems to be, I wanted a more mobile version. I started out just writing down the places in my mobile PDA, but really wanted those pins on a map. Today I figured, "someone's got to have built something online." Sure enough, with a simple google search I was lead to several options. The one I chose was YourGMap as it actually had the pins and I could edit information about each destination. So, here's my travels...

Part of the excitement of blogging is the dialogue that is created between different people. Initially, we had the simple comment responses, but as the product developed the idea of trackbacks was included. This allowed each blogger to post their commentary on their respected blogs and link the two so viewers could still understand the dialogue and expansion of thoughts. After reading CIO magazine, I see that they do a great job of providing a short URL to each article for reference. Wired does this as well. The really cool trick would be to provide a trackback URL instead so that if a reader wanted to comment on a particular article, they could trackback to the original publisher’s article.

As someone who seems to be in the airport almost as much as they’re home, I want to take this entry to just rant about some business processes and systems that need some investment.

Canceled Flights
- If a flight is canceled or delayed significantly, the system should automatically reconfirm everyone onto the next appropriate flight rather than have the desk agent try to manually handle these. They would simply provide boarding passes or make changes when the customer has a new preference.

Membership Lounges
- If you’re going to code share, then you should share customer data as well. Recently I was in the Frankfurt airport flying Lufthansa and as a Star Alliance Gold member through United, I wanted to use the First Class lounge even though I was only business class. The lounge said Star Alliance Gold members were welcome, but I had nothing that “proved” that because my boarding pass was with Lufthansa and thus didn’t show my credential. It was surprising to me that they couldn’t simply look me up to verify I in fact had earned the right to be in that lounge. Interestingly, on another visit, I had a United boarding pass that showed I was Premier Executive (Gold) and they argued with me as to whether that was acceptable proof. Someone needs to check the customer service processes for this loyalty program.

While the Internet has allowed for a significant number of transactions to be pushed out to the customer in the fashion of “self-service”, many of these are so time consuming and frustrating a business opportunity is created. One of the most frustrating “self-service” transactions in my opinion is that of air travel. When I am using company money, it’s relatively easy as I simply log into my company travel website, select my travel dates, let it validate corporate policies, attempt to find the lowest fare and… I’m done. I just click “Purchase” because it’s not my money.

Now, let’s take the situation where you’re trying to book a ticket home for Christmas. You likely live at least two connections from home and the ticket of course is close to the average monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment. So, you begin the battle of trying multiple websites and forums to uncover the top-secret, super limited, “lowest fare”. Really, you have no idea if you found the lowest fare, but after spending multiple hours and having seen potentially tens if not hundreds of fare options, you give up assuming you’re close enough. Well, I’d like to propose the airlines just change their customer pricing practices and not be such __________. But, I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.

In the mean time, there is a significant opportunity to “outsource” this task to someone else. Given the price of labor in other markets, a company could setup a call center to accept travel requests, research them and provide the customer with the “lowest fare”. The idea would be to take the pain out of the transaction along with the wasted time. A customer would call up or text message the service and outline their travel constraints (e.g., optional dates, schedule, etc.). That would be it. They’d then wait for a call or email confirming an itinerary and it would be done. If there were follow-up questions due to similar options, the service provider would call the customer and ask which option they’d like to go with. The self-service web transaction would then simply be to setup your profile with frequent flyer numbers, credit cards, etc. This of course could also all be done over the phone if you just didn’t want to deal with it online.

It would be like your own personal assistant. Imagine the possibilities. Restaurant reservations, sports tickets…